Donald Davidson is, arguably, the most important philosopher of mind and language in recent decades. His articulation of the position he called "anomalous monism" and his ideas for unifying the general theory of linguistic meaning with semantics for natural language both set new agendas in the field. _Interpreting Davidson_ collects original essays on his work by some of his leading contemporaries, with Davidson himself contributing a reply to each and an original paper of his own.

Petr Kot'átko; XI*—Two Notions of Utterance Meaning, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 98, Issue 1, 1 June 1998, Pages 225–240, https://doi.org/10.

In a recent article (Inquiry, Vol. 19 [1976]), J. W. Meiland addresses the issue of psychologism in logic, which holds that logic is a branch of psychology and that logical laws (such as the Principle of Non?Contradiction) are contingent upon the nature of the mind. Meiland examines Husserl's critique of psychologism, argues that Husserl is not convincing, and offers two new objections to the psychologistic thesis. In this paper I attempt to rebut those objections. In question are the acceptable criteria (...) for determining the possibility or impossibility of systems of logic significantly different from our own. I argue that a criteriological application of our accepted laws of logic to this question commits a circular fallacy. I then argue that, even if we accept logical consistency as a criterion for possibility, a plausible argument for the possibility of valid alternative logics can be constructed by using the functionalist analogy between minds and automata. Finally, I attempt to rebut the claim that in logic the only changes possible are conceptual changes that would not permit a proposition to be both true and false. (shrink)

Morality, resp. moral communication, undergoes substantial changes when it is computer‐mediated, i.e. cyberspace provides a different moral infrastructure. Firstly, there are different conditions regarding the transaction costs that frame the relation between moral motivation and the expectation of the success of a moral act. Secondly, there is the transformation of ownership and property, which are the basic content of moral actions and communications. The personal accountability of one’s and somebody else’s own is altered; a special ethic of virtual ownership is (...) developing, which finds its expression in the manifold production of public goods in virtual networks. This development is reflected in the dialectics of digital commons and anti‐commons. Thirdly, there is the ludic structure of cyberspace. The medial conditions of cyberspace are analogous to the basic principles of play. Playing as a self‐motivated action is a reason for moral behaviour in cyberspace, especially for the production of public goods. (shrink)

In [5], Metakides and Nerode introduced the study of recursively enumerable substructures of a recursively presented structure. The main line of study presented in [5] is to examine the effective content of certain algebraic structures. In [6], Metakides and Nerode studied the lattice of r.e. subspaces of a recursively presented vector space. This lattice was later studied by Kalantari, Remmel, Retzlaff and Shore. Similar studies have been done by Metakides and Nerode [7] for algebraically closed fields, by Remmel (...) [10] for Boolean algebras and by Metakides and Remmel [8] and [9] for orderings. Kalantari and Retzlaff [4] introduced and studied the lattice of r.e. subsets of a recursively presented topological space. Kalantari and Retzlaff consideredX, a topological space with ⊿, a countable basis. This basis is coded into integers and with the help of this coding, r.e. subsets ofωgive rise to r.e. subsets ofX. The notion of “recursiveness” of a topological space is the natural next step which gives rise to the question of what should be the “degree” of an r.e. open subset ofX? It turns out that any r.e. open set partitions ⊿; into four sets whose Turing degrees become central in answering the question raised above.In this paper we show that the degrees of the elements of the partition of ⊿ imposed by an r.e. open set can be “controlled independently” in a sense to be made precise in the body of the paper. In [4], Kalantari and Retzlaff showed that givenAany r.e. set andany r.e. open subset ofX, there exists an r.e. open set ℋ which is a subset ofand is dense in and in whichAis coded. This shows that modulo a nowhere dense set, an r.e. open set can become as complicated as desired. After giving the general technical and notational machinery in §1, and giving the particulars of our needs in §2, in §3 we prove that the set ℋ described above could be made to be precisely of degree ofA. We then go on and establish various results on the mentioned partitioning of ⊿. One of the surprising results is that there are r.e. open sets such that every element of partitioning of ⊿ is of a different degree. Since the exact wording of the results uses the technical definitions of these partitioning elements, we do not summarize the results here and ask the reader to examine §3 after browsing through §§1 and 2. (shrink)

The concept of mimesis has been central to philosophical aesthetics from Aristotle to Kendall Walton: in plain terms, it highlights the links between a fictional world or a representational practice on the one hand and the real world on the other. The present collection of essays includes discussions of its general viability and pertinence and of its historical origins, as well as detailed analyses of various relevant issues regarding literature, film, theatre, images and computer games. The individual papers offer new (...) arguments for the specialist, yet in their sum also provide a solid and helpful survey of the current state of the debate. Contributions by P. Alward, G. Currie, D. Davies, L. Dole el, J. Hamilton, T. Kobli ek, P. Kot'atko, A. Kuzmicova, J. Levinson, A. Meskin, A. Pettersson, M. Pokorny, J. Robson, G. Rossholm, R. M. Sainsbury, F. Stjernberg, E. Terrone, K. Thein, A. Voltolini. (shrink)

In [6], Metakides and Nerode introduced the study of the lattice of recursively enumerable substructures of a recursively presented model as a means to understand the recursive content of certain algebraic constructions. For example, the lattice of recursively enumerable subspaces,, of a recursively presented vector spaceV∞has been studied by Kalantari, Metakides and Nerode, Retzlaff, Remmel and Shore. Similar studies have been done by Remmel [12], [13] for Boolean algebras and by Metakides and Nerode [9] for algebraically closed fields. (...) In all of these models, the algebraic closure of a set is nontrivial., is given in §1, however in vector spaces, cl is just the subspace generated byS, in Boolean algebras, cl is just the subalgebra generated byS, and in algebraically closed fields, cl is just the algebraically closed subfield generated byS.)In this paper, we give a general model theoretic setting in which we are able to give constructions which generalize many of the constructions of classical recursion theory. One of the main features of the modelswhich we study is that the algebraic closure of setis just itself, i.e., cl = S. Examples of such models include the natural numbers under equality 〈N, = 〉, the rational numbers under the usual ordering 〈Q, ≤〉, and a large class ofn-dimensional partial orderings. (shrink)

In this article we show that it is possible to completely classify the degrees of r.e. bases of r.e. vector spaces in terms of weak truth table degrees. The ideas extend to classify the degrees of complements and splittings. Several ramifications of the classification are discussed, together with an analysis of the structure of the degrees of pairs of r.e. summands of r.e. spaces.

In this paper, we study the lower semilattice of NP-subspaces of both the standard polynomial time representation and the tally polynomial time representation of a countably infinite dimensional vector space V∞ over a finite field F. We show that for both the standard and tally representation of V∞, there exists polynomial time subspaces U and W such that U + V is not recursive. We also study the NP analogues of simple and maximal subspaces. We show that the existence of (...) P-simple and NP-maximal subspaces is oracle dependent in both the tally and standard representations of V∞. This contrasts with the case of sets, where the existence of NP-simple sets is oracle dependent but NP-maximal sets do not exist. We also extend many results of Nerode and Remmel concerning the relationship of P bases and NP-subspaces in the tally representation of V∞ to the standard representation of V∞. (shrink)

A computable graph is constructed which is not computably isomorphic to any polynomial-time graph with a standard universe . Conditions are given under which a computable graph is computably isomorphic to a polynomial-time graph with a standard universe — for example, if every vertex has finite degree. Two special types of graphs are studied. It is shown that any computable tree is recursively isomorphic to a p-time tree with standard universe and that any computable equivalence relation is computably isomorphic to (...) a p-time equivalence relation with standard universe. (shrink)

Index sets are used to measure the complexity of properties associated with the differentiability of real functions and the existence of solutions to certain classic differential equations. The new notion of a locally computable real function is introduced and provides several examples of Σ04 complete sets.

Gelfond and Lifschitz proposed the notion of a stable model of a logic program. We establish that the set of all stable models in a Herbrand universe of a recursive logic program is, up to recursive renaming, the set of all infinite paths of a recursive, countably branching tree, and conversely. As a consequence, the problem, given a recursive logic program, of determining whether it has at least one stable model, is Σ11-complete. Due to the equivalences established in the authors' (...) previous nonmonotone rule systems papers ), this applies equally to truth maintenance systems and default logics. (shrink)

The first-order theory of the lattice of recursively enumerable closed subsets of an effective topological space is proved undecidable using the undecidability of the first-order theory of the lattice of recursively enumerable sets. In particular, the first-order theory of the lattice of recursively enumerable closed subsets of Euclidean n -space, for all n , is undecidable. A more direct proof of the undecidability of the lattice of recursively enumerable closed subsets of Euclidean n -space, n ⩾ 2, is provided using (...) the method of reduction and the recursive inseparability of the set of all formulae satisfiable in every model of the theory of SIBs and the set of all formulae refutable in some finite model of the theory of SIBs. (shrink)

The influence and reputation of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, is easily comparable to the impact of groundbreaking theoretical texts. Numerous philosophers, aestheticians and theorists of literature, music, or visual arts have been induced by this short story by J.L. Borges to reconsider the status of the literary work of art, to rethink the relationship between work and text. The essays collected here move from analyses of the identity of the literary work of art, as it is explicitly established (...) by Borges? narrator, to arguments that simply employ the Menard case as an opportunity for discussing broader issues of literary studies and the philosophy of literature. Selected essays even abandon the field of literature altogether, moving on to analogous issues in the theory of visual arts and music. (shrink)

We study computability theoretic properties of and equivalence structures and how they differ from computable equivalence structures or equivalence structures that belong to the Ershov difference hierarchy. Our investigation includes the complexity of isomorphisms between equivalence structures and between equivalence structures.

An ω-language is a set of infinite sequences on a countable language, and corresponds to a set of real numbers in a natural way. Languages may be described by logical formulas in the arithmetical hierarchy and also may be described as the set of words accepted by some type of automata or Turing machine. Certain families of languages, such as the equation image languages, may enumerated as P0, P1, … and then an index set associated to a given property R (...) of languages is just the set of e such that Pe has the property. The complexity of index sets for 7 types of languages is determined for various properties related to the size of the language. (shrink)

We give resource bounded versions of the Completeness Theorem for propositional and predicate logic. For example, it is well known that every computable consistent propositional theory has a computable complete consistent extension. We show that, when length is measured relative to the binary representation of natural numbers and formulas, every polynomial time decidable propositional theory has an exponential time (EXPTIME) complete consistent extension whereas there is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP) decidable theory which has no polynomial time complete consistent extension (...) when length is measured relative to the binary representation of natural numbers and formulas. It is well known that a propositional theory is axiomatizable (respectively decidable) if and only if it may be represented as the set of infinite paths through a computable tree (respectively a computable tree with no dead ends). We show that any polynomial time decidable theory may be represented as the set of paths through a polynomial time decidable tree. On the other hand, the statement that every polynomial time decidable, relative to the tally representation of natural numbers and formulas, is equivalent to P = NP. For predicate logic, we develop a complexity theoretic version of the Henkin construction to prove a complexity theoretic version of the Completeness Theorem. Our results imply that that any polynomial space decidable theory △ possesses a polynomial space computable model which is exponential space decidable and thus △ has an exponential space complete consistent extension. Similar results are obtained for other notions of complexity. (shrink)

We investigate the complexity of finding solutions to infinite recursive constraint satisfaction problems. We show that, in general, the problem of finding a solution to an infinite recursive constraint satisfaction problem is equivalent to the problem of finding an infinite path through a recursive tree. We also identify natural classes of infinite recursive constraint satisfaction problems where the problem of finding a solution to the infinite recursive constraint satisfaction problem is equivalent to the problem of finding an infinite path through (...) finitely branching recursive trees or recursive binary trees. There are a large number of results in the literature on the complexity of the problem of finding an infinite path through a recursive tree. Our main result allows us to automatically transfer such results to give equivalent results about the complexity of the problem of finding a solution to a recursive constraint satisfaction problem. (shrink)

The problem of when a recursive graph has a recursive k-coloring has been extensively studied by Bean, Schmerl, Kierstead, Remmel, and others. In this paper, we study the polynomial time analogue of that problem. We develop a number of negative and positive results about colorings of polynomial time graphs. For example, we show that for any recursive graph G and for any k, there is a polynomial time graph G′ whose vertex set is {0,1}* such that there is an (...) effective degree preserving correspondence between the set of k-colorings of G and the set of k-colorings of G′ and hence there are many examples of k-colorable polynomial time graphs with no recursive k-colorings. Moreover, even though every connected 2-colorable recursive graph is recursively 2-colorable, there are connected 2-colorable polynomial time graphs which have no primitive recursive 2-coloring. We also give some sufficient conditions which will guarantee that a polynomial time graph has a polynomial time or exponential time coloring. (shrink)